Labour Party’s presidential candidate, Peter Obi, is in his elements again.
He is back into the mood that make many of his followers worship him as he shreds Nigeria’s economy and leadership.
Giving a biting analysis on the state of the nation on Monday, Obi carpeted the economy as an unproductive one and the leadership of the country as lazy and parasitic – one that is always sharing and not producing.
Besides, he said workers spent 100 per cent of their earnings on food:
“This is a country of 200 million people sitting on 923,000 square kilometers of land. They cannot feed themselves, they cannot export anything. Total Nigeria’s export including oil is under two billion dollars for 200 million population.”
Obi said this when he met with the leaderships of the Migerian Labour Congress and the Trade Union Congress, who pledged to support his candidature.
Obi said his visit to the leadership of the two labour centres was not to campaign but for a courtesy call to honour the Organised Labour on whose party and interest he was seeking Nigerians votes in the 2023 general elections.
“My commitment is to move Nigeria from consumption to production and you can not talk about production without labour.
“Labour is the engine of production, capital and machine can do anything but labour is what makes it work.
”Because labour is the greatest contributor to production, it has to be properly remunerated.
“I do not need to tell you how bad things are in this country today. if you are on wages, today Nigerians spend 100 per cent of their wages on just feeding.
”So many don’t even know where their next meal will come from. They pay to train their children only for them to finish school and stay at home without work,” he said.
Obi said that these were issues that needed to be discussed.
“Nobody can be president without sitting down with labour organisations to decide the future of Nigeria.”
He said that Nigerians would no longer have a situation where the leaders would be here and workers would be there.
“They must sit on the same table and talk.”
According to him, that is the beginning of the solution, that is what is happening all over the world.
“Nigeria is not a producing country. The collective effect of what we are suffering today is bad leadership.
“We have a leadership that concentrates on sharing. So you have to move from sharing formula to production formula.
“This is a country of 200 million people sitting on 923,000 square kilometers of land. They cannot feed themselves, they cannot export anything. Total Nigeria’s export including oil is under two billion dollars for 200 million population.
”A similar country, not a first world country, one with the same tragectory with Nigeria in the year 2000, Vetnam, sitting on 331,000 square kilometers of land, a third of Nigeria’s land space and 100 million population, with half of Nigeria’s population, their total earnings last year was 312 billion dollars,” he said.
Obi however noted that more than half of the country’s youths of productive age were unemployed, adding “this is what the Labour Party is seeking to sit down to discuss for the future of our country.”
He said that borrowing was not the problem of the country as other countries were also borrowing to support their economic development drive.
“If you borrow for consumption, you are in problem but if you borrow for production, you will progress.”
